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'People, Places & Things' by Duncan Macmillan or 'The doctor will see you now.'

‘People, Places & Things’,
Duncan Macmillan

Dorfman Theatre (National), 1st
September 2015

I love Duncan Macmillan. I’m
possibly even addicted to him. ‘Lungs’ broke my heart, ‘Every Brilliant Thing’
warmed my soul and ‘1984’ scared the shit out of me. This is a playwright who
instinctively understands love and fear and how to smother his
audience with those emotions. He really is some sort of emotional wizard. But ‘People,
Places & Things’, which explores the devastating impact of addiction, didn’t
hit me in the heart. It’s a play about a woman – an actress – who has been
obliterated by her drug addiction. It’s a play about a world with the centre
torn right out of it. It’s a play that seems to be missing something.

This is Macmillan’s second
collaboration with the Headlong team but, whilst 1984 felt like a complete and
clawing experience, ‘People’ – directed by Jeremy Herrin – feels a little bit
tentative. It’s as if Herrin isn’t quite sure how much to fuck things up;
whether he is creating a sensory rollercoaster or a sensitive, steady and
searching journey.

The play begins with Emma
(Denise Gough) arriving at the reception of rehab, smashed out of her head on a
stunning concoction of drugs. Gough is quite brilliant and never forces her
performance. Her Emma is not ‘whacky’ or anything particularly exceptional. She
is a burnt out, broken and stroppy as hell. In fact, Emma is barely there at
all, which makes those rare moments when she finally emerges from her dazed
cocoon all the more powerful.

Emma sways around the reception,
desperate but reluctant to ask for help. Gradually, the hallucinations kick in;
they should be scary and dislocating as fuck but they’re actually pretty
predictable. At one point two receptionists, rather than one, pop up from
behind the desk. Gulp. The walls in Bunny Christie’s giant cocoon-like set,
which wraps a clinical white floor up and over the stage, begin to blur and
crumble – but they’re rather pretty projections and they don’t have much of an
impact. A bevvy of blond actresses, who all look a lot like Emma, flood the
stage and freak out in rather tidy harmony. It’s all a bit packaged, easy –
stagey and safe.

There are no moments when the
audience is slapped around the face or shaken to the core. As an experiment in
the dislocating impact of addiction, this production fails. That’s a shame but
not a disaster – there’s an awful lot more going on in this play. Of course
there is – it’s Duncan Macmillan people! So whilst the physical impact of drug
addiction is in play here, the emotional and psychological impact is much more significant.
Above all, this is a piece about the way that addiction robs the addict of his
or her identity; the way in which drugs alter human behaviour in such a way
that it is impossible to say where the effect of the drugs ends and personality
begins.

There are a few golden scenes in which Macmillan and company interrogate this erosion of identity – and relationships
– quite beautifully. But there is one jarring problem behind all these
discussions: Macmillan makes Emma an actress. This means that lots of Emma’s
hallucinations involve little play extracts and a lot of her flights of fancy are
– in reality – borrowed from classic plays. It means that Emma is allowed to
say lines like ‘If I’m not in role, I’m dead’ without it really meaning much. It
means that the play’s central discussion about the way in which identity is
constructed – and broken down - feels a bit lazy, indulgent even. It means that
every time we see Emma’s personality physically fractured on stage – as all
those lookalike actresses scurry around her – we’re not really thinking that
deeply. It all feels like a performance rather than something truthful,
searching and hard-earned. And it means that Macmillan’s dialogue, which is
normally so emotionally pure and astute, feels just a tad manipulative – no more
so than when Emma goes to an audition after she gets out of rehab and, once
complete, mutters ‘Thank you for seeing me’. I mean, come now!

In the penultimate scene, the
heart of ‘People’ finally begins to beat – hard and loud. Emma returns home to
her stiff backed mother (Barbara Marten) and mumbling father (Kevin McMonagle).
She apologises to her family – as rehearsed back in rehab – but Emma’s parents
go completely off script. They do not offer her support. They barely offer her
love. We begin to understand the cruel way that Emma’s addiction has sliced
right through the heart of her family. Her mother is no longer able to be a
mother, her father can no longer be a dad. Love has been bitterly and persistently
shoved aside and, in its place, has risen up loving but closed-hearted support.
In one particularly bruising blow, Emma’s mother scoffs ‘I know you sweetheart’
and the awful ambiguity of that phrase stings us all. Which Emma does her
mother know – and how much has Emma’s mother been part of her daughter’s growing
dependency on drugs? Is addiction a complete devastation of everything that
went before – or the final slam of the foot through an already rotten foundation?